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Eleven European states failed to meet last weekâs European Commission deadline for the introduction of new regulations freeing banks and brokers from using national exchanges for reporting and trading equities, the commission revealed today.

Mifid, the markets in financial instruments directive which governs where and how shares can be traded, came into force on November 1, but it was still unclear at that point how many countries had complied.

Now the Commission has confirmed that seven domestic regulators, including those in Spain, Poland and Portugal, did not meet a November 1 deadline to detail how they planned to implement the directive in their market.

Domestic regulators were originally set a January 31 deadline for Mifid transposition, which involves detailing how the EC rulebook would be applied in their jurisdictions.

Four countries only partially fulfilled this obligation, according to analysis of EC documents by JWG-IT, the Mifid think-tank.

The Netherlands and Finland transposed their Mifid plans to the EC on October 31, the last date they could submit the information and meet the deadline, but the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal and Spain missed it.

Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania and Slovenia partly met the deadline by transposing only part of the directive.

The commission was forced to give market watchdogs more time to prepare their individual responses to the directive after the UK was the only of the 30 participating countries to meet the January 31 target.

Jitz Desai, a director at JWG-IT believes there is still much work to do for all countries that transposed after the January deadline.

He said: “The reason the EC set a January deadline for transposition was to allow companies in those markets nine months to prepare for the changes.”

Desai said the majority of European regulators will move to enforce the rule changes domestically next year but there is already confusion about the obligations of regulated companies.

He said: “Until the rules are enforced investment companies may find themselves unclear as to their position regarding customer challenges, given the laws have been transposed in their local markets now.”